Using First-Party Data to Personalize Your Marketing

I rarely open marketing emails but this email from Spotify last week caught my attention.

Not only do I work in Reston, but I also could listen to Rodrigo y Gabriela’s description-defying guitar prowess for hours on end. Spotify got it right for me. They clearly understand that keeping track of individual consumer behaviors and acting on that insight is the key to success in today’s digital-first world. They’re able to deliver on promises like “[we’ll tell you about] upcoming concerts near you by artists youlove,” and keep their emails user centric.

Spotify, of course, has a big advantage. Its average user spends over two hours a day streaming music, podcasts, and more. That’s a hell of a lot of first-party data to work with. By sifting through all that rich data, Spotify can personalize email campaigns and push relevant ads inside their platform. They can probably predict when I’m working out at the gym, am on a family road-trip, or am putting a coversheet on my TPS report based on my choice of music.

But what if you’re not Spotify? What if you instead fit the profile of a typical Fortune 1000 company in which your CRM and marketing data are undernourished and, hence, underutilized. Your contacts are idling in your database because you lack the breadth of data needed to engage them regularly with personalized outbound marketing campaigns.

This is why my team has been developing connectors for brands to access meaningful data around their consumers’ digital behaviors, characteristics, and preferences which are key to a transformation into an empathetic brand that’s in touch with its customers’ daily lifestyles. We’ve narrowed audience intelligence down to two important pillars of information:

Audience DNA: Our own system for interpreting social relationships and behavioral patterns, as well as mapping data back to people. Our ever-growing database now indexes a quarter of a billion social identities across 191 data dimensions, letting you discover who your consumers are so that you can craft campaigns that are relevant to their interests.

Audience Signals: Data that lets you know when to engage with your consumer. This data relates to your consumers’ real-time activity on social media, helping you identify key moments (e.g., when purchase intent is high or an important life event has occurred) to initiate a brand interaction.

How to Get the Data You Need

Integrating audience intelligence like this into your first-party data takes three steps:

Make sure to request customer consent prior to embarking on a transformation journey like this. Always be explicit in asking permission to look up customers online in return for crafting more personalized experiences for them. (We’ll cover approaches for asking for consent in a separate blog.)

By acquiring all this data, you’ll have the relevant and timely data points for expressing your brand in the right way to the right people. Like Spotify, you can start sending messages that resonate at a deeper level and convert customers like me into lifelong fans who feel a personal connection to your brand.

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